There are thousands of nonprofit cat rescues. Nearly all of them deserve a better website than they've got.

I run Hide & Scratch, a cat enrichment company. When I started Give a Cat a Box — sending enrichment boxes to rescues and shelters — I began partnering with these organizations directly, and spending a lot of time on their websites.

The same picture came up again and again: an organization doing genuinely excellent work behind a website that hadn't been touched in years. Donate buttons that didn't work on a phone. Adoption pages listing cats rehomed long ago.

Not one of those was a competence problem. Every one was a capacity problem — no budget line, no spare evening, and no reason a volunteer should have to learn web design on top of everything else.

The thing is, I also build websites for a living. So I was looking at a problem I already knew how to solve, in a world I already work in, for organizations I already know. Once you've seen that, it's difficult to unsee.

Before committing to any of it I rebuilt one rescue's site end to end — not as a favor, but to be certain the economics held up and this wasn't just a nice idea. They did.

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Building a good small website used to be expensive because it took a professional weeks. It doesn't anymore. What used to be a $2,000 project is now hours of work — which means the honest price for a rescue is nothing to build, and a small amount to keep running.

That's the whole idea. Not charity exactly: the rebuild is a contribution, and then it's a straightforward service at a price a rescue can actually carry.

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